Salvation Has Come
Craig Keen
Luke 2:22–40
December 31, 2023
Luke 2:22-40
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons."
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, "Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." And the child's father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too."
There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.
When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
Life is hard. Life is short. Life is good. Life, we might even be bold to say, is Beautiful. All that is true. Of course, on some particular night or day, a life may not look beautiful or even good; and on other days or nights, a life may not look hard or short . . . certainly not when viewed casually. But when viewed more carefully, more tenderly, more empathetically, more lovingly, everything becomes more complicated: even the worst moments have beauty, so much beauty; even the easiest moments are hard, so very hard; even the longest lives are short, too, too short; even the worst moments are good . . . because we are alive. And so, Roberto Benigni, in 1997, won the Oscar for his performance in the Best Picture nominated film, Life Is Beautiful, the story of a Jewish father and his Jewish son imprisoned in a Nazi Concentration Camp during World War II, the story of a father who would not let Nazi evil do its wretched work on his little son, the story of a father who, in the most oppressive of environments, again and again made his little son laugh, made him feel in his hungry body—in spite of everything to the contrary—that “life is beautiful.”
And life is beautiful, and good, even when it is too hard and too short. Ancient Israel knew this. It knew that God had chosen them, had made them God’s people, before they were any people at all, when they were just a possible future of one old man and one old woman, Abram and Sarai, childless, far from home. God had granted Ancient Israel a future in a land of promise. They knew good work in the fields, tilling the soil or tending sheep or cattle. They knew good food and drink, holy feasts and ordinary, crusty, daily bread. They knew that neighbors become strong by working alongside one another. They knew that presumed individuals become a village of households when they give and receive life to and from one another, on common land. When a household was gifted with the promise of a new generation, the promise of a newborn in what we call marriage, that is, the promise of a child borne by a young mother herself borne years before into one of the other households in this little village—when a household was gifted in that way, any doubt vanished that the future of one is entangled in the future of all.
But they also knew the anxiety of injury and infection in a time of folk medicine without antibiotics, of starvation without government assistance, of violence at the hands of strangers or, worse, at the hands of friends, all without police intervention, of old age and its inevitable outcome. Even the source of great joy was often the source of great anxiety.
There was no more joyful occasion than the announcement that a new child would in a few months be born, a new child who would—as a new child—embody the promise that this household, this village, this tribe, this nation, this human race may yet live on. But, at the same time, pregnancy and childbirth marked the most dangerous of times. Pregnancy and childbirth in Ancient Israel were the occasion of the greatest likelihood of death, greater than famine, war, infection, or plague, making each of those calamities that much more deadly. No other calamity left more dead bodies in its wake. And when we remember that there was also no greater joy than childbirth, the trauma of the death of a newborn and a mother-to-be is almost too hard for us to take in even as observers far in Ancient Israel’s future.
It was in such a world that the poor villagers of Ancient Israel lived out into a dangerous future. It was in such a world that they worshiped “the living God,” receiving the promise that they, too, were gifted with life, life entangled in the lives of others. God has put us here, they believed, and we are here to live, no matter how hard and short life may one day have turned out to be.
Ancient Israel in this way lived their lives concretely, close to the ground, close to the land, feeling the moisture of the soil on their hands, smelling a gathering storm, giving ear to rustling underbrush, tasting the salt of hard work, watching the sky shade from azure to gray and back again. They lived between childbirth and death, whether sudden death or the slow silent end of prolonged decline, a sudden or slow death that put them in the ground, in the land God had promised them and from which they could never be abstracted. We—bodies as we are—and the land God has rooted us in . . . are inseparable and together are carried by promise.
We are much less inclined than they were to take deadly seriously our bodily entanglement in one another and in the land. We have learned from pagans, especially from Greeks and Romans, that our bodies and the land our bodies work are of only temporary importance. We have learned from them that we aren’t actually our bodies; rather we have bodies. What I truly am, we have learned from these pagan thinkers, is a soul temporarily imprisoned in a material body. My body is mortal, we have been told, but my soul is immortal. I look out upon my body and the land, as if I were in a high tower, and I make calculations and I make decisions and I train myself in the virtues of the soul, in order to become a person of integrity, with a clear identity, one who lives authentically. It is all “I, I, I!”
Of course, it is easy to see why these pagan ideas would appeal to the church, a church that worshipped the God of the Jesus who was not defeated by death, the Jesus who called upon us to consider this world of sorrow and pain to be passing away, the Jesus who demonstrated that not even death can separate us from the love of God. But the difference is that the pagans who so massively influenced the church’s views found the notion of the resurrection of the mutilated body of Jesus completely insane, repulsive to their competent minds, impossible to comprehend, pure foolishness. Ancient Israel thought and lived differently—though, it is to be admitted, they also had a hard time with the gospel, the gospel that struck them as way too much, as more than their categories could take in, without rupture.
Again, unlike Greece and Rome, Ancient Israel knew in their bones that we are bodies all the way down. The Hebrew word most often translated into the English “soul” is a very concrete word. In fact most of the time it appears in the Old Testament it means something like “neck” or “throat.” From this usage it came to be associated with hunger and thirst, since it is the throat that receives food and water. It was a small step next for the word to come to mean “yearning.” Only then does it begin to gesture toward the ones who engage in that yearning, the ones who hunger or thirst.
(Maybe the best illustration of this imagination is to be found in Genesis 2. There, having created everything else, God sets out to create a human. God scrapes together an Adam sculpture from the dust of the ground and breathes into its nostrils. As God’s breath permeates this compacted dust, the sculpture stirs and rises. It has become “a living nephesh,” to use the Hebrew word, “a living soul,” to use the King James translation, or, perhaps better, “a living hunger.” To Ancient Israel I am not a soul trapped in a body, but a body that yearns, that yearns above all for God, that does so because God would not leave me to blow away as mere dust.)
Of course, we like the story of a soul trapped in a body and we don’t really care, if it is pagan. It gives us comfort to imagine that I am an identity that cannot die and that I will one day slough off this bag of bones. The way that Ancient Israel imagined life and death strikes us as insecure. The prospect that Israel might have been right scares us. “What happens, then, when we die?!,” we ask. Their answer is that when we die, we are dead, we settle into “Abraham’s bosom,” as if our entanglement in the history of Israel, its past and future, is forever our destiny, even when life has come to an end. But we want more and we cry out, “Is that all there is?!”
[Pause]
And so, let us attend to Luke 2, as it stands open-eyed at the precipice of death, and there hopes in the coming of God to abide with the poor, with the dying and the dead.
Poverty is a difficult concept. In fact it may not be a concept at all, since it gestures toward a lack, an absence. That absence, however, is also difficult to specify. Since we have all been trained to imagine wealth and poverty in terms of money, we are inclined to think of poverty as having too little of it. But poverty is not about money, not really. It is about goods: food, shelter, medicine, work, rest, companions, children, grandchildren, friends, all those things and persons without which we cannot live. The poor are those who lack such things, those in fact who, because of this lack, are having life drained out of them by the principalities and powers of this present evil age. It is true that some of the poor, some of those being robbed of life, have an abundance of money, but they are not the ones the gospel asks us first to imagine. The gospel asks us to imagine widows and orphans and strangers and the very old.
Luke 2 tells us just a little of the stories of two persons whom we may understand as “poor,” one of these persons, because she is a widow when and where widowhood was the most precarious of lives, both of these persons, because they are very old, that is, they cannot expect long before they die. What they receive at the temple, when Jesus is delivered to be ritually consecrated to God, is the confirmation, however vaguely they understand it, that their coming death and the coming death of all would not have the last word. They have seen their “salvation” in the warm body of a squirming, vulnerable child, a child, like all children, easily killed, by disease, famine, drought, or the violence of a cruel king’s murder squads.
Another gift is given to Simeon and Anna, however, as they received this child. Salvation not only signifies that death will not have the last word to their long lives. It also signifies that the lives they have lived have not been lived in vain.
The “salvation” that is depicted in the gospel of Luke is not just any salvation. Again, we have been trained to think of salvation as the departure of a ghostlike soul from a perishing body, an ascent into an invisible heaven by an invisible personal spirit. But since the people of Judea and Galilee at the time of Jesus knew in their bones that we are nothing without our bodies, “salvation” was in the gospel and among those who flocked to it “the resurrection of the body” not the immortality of the soul. What the people of this land on the shore of the western Mediterranean imagined as “salvation” was the transformation of “me,” of “you,” of “us,” not as if lifeless, necrotic tissue were reanimated, but as if a lifetime of the work and play of muscles and blood and skin and bones—in all their inseparability from the land and the others who worked it with them—as if all the moments of their lives were remembered by God and in all their concreteness gathered into God’s Reign, enlivened there, saturated by the holiness of the Holy Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The gift received by Anna and Simeon is the gift of the promise that their lives have not been in vain, have not been a series of meaningless moments, each lost in an infinite sea of a time without beginning or end. God, the one who holds all of history in an open hand, says, “Yes!,” to every day and night of their lives and thereby says, “Yes!,” to them. No cut, no bruise, no sorrow, no loss, no night of good rest, no day of good work, no moment of the breaking of a fever at a sickbed, no wedding day, no birthday, no death day, nothing and nowhere will be lost. God’s salvation is not the salvation merely of a ghost or merely of the tissue marking the space occupied by a dead body on burial day. God’s salvation is the salvation of a lifetime. Because a lifetime is a human being. You are your lifetime, from the moment your mother caught your father’s eye, to the moment you were lowered into your grave—and every moment into which these moments are forever entangled.
When Jesus walks out of his tomb, like and unlike other living bodies, alive with a life that has no opposite in death, alive with the Holy Spirit into whose glory he has moved, in that moment, God says, “Yes!,” to every moment of his life, among them the moment when Simeon, and the moment when Anna, beheld him in the temple. And since his body, saturated by God’s glory, is not intact, but torn open to every outside, they, too, are gathered into that glory—that is, their salvation has come, come on the Easter Sunday that will not be pried away from Good Friday or Holy Saturday or any moment of any day in the history of God’s good creation.
Sermon for Living Water Church of the Nazarene
December 3, 2023
Isaiah 64
Craig Keen
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people. Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins. After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord? Will you keep silent, and punish us so severely? [The Word of the Sovereign God]
Once not so long ago, to be a good citizen of America, to be a good citizen of England, to be a good citizen of virtually any of the nation states of Western Civilization, was also to be a Christian. When Europe colonized the world, it did so in part by way of priests and other church officials, Roman Catholic and Protestant. Of course, it colonized chiefly by violence, by subjecting to its authority all the people it encountered around the world. But alongside well provisioned soldiers were representatives of churches, of Christianity. It is always tragic and a betrayal of the gospel, when the political strategies of power-hungry kings and presidents get the blessing and support of churches, even when it is done naively or with the belief that some worldly strategies are better than others.
[Pause]
Our time is different than old Christendom, however. We now live in a secular America and traditionally Christian Europe began secularizing decades before we did. Of course, there are efforts to turn back the clock, to return worldly power and glory to the Christianity of America and other countries. In America that is sometimes—though not always—evident when Christians oppose one another over national or state or local policy. It is even more evident when they promote some specific candidate or bankroll the campaigns of a political party or use leverage to change, say, the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Still, by and large, we live in a secularized world, a world that looks to human cunning and power to make a better future, rather than to lean upon the guidance and prayers of the faithful and to wait for the coming of the holy God of Jesus.
However, even in a very secularized America, such as the America of San Diego, the word “Christian” still has a function. It guides our movers and shakers, however vaguely and corruptly. The word “Christian” is among them, of course, domesticated and toothless, it is a deeply buried memory of a bygone era dominated by the ideas and institutions of “Christianity.” But it is still at play.
The strange lingering power of “Christianity” appears perhaps in the form of a European “state church,” one supported by taxes, even if not by church attendance, as in England, or of a less officially authorized “Christian culture,” which is what America recalls and sometimes still aspires to, here and there. The behaviors suggested by the ordinary word “Christian” are still colored by what was once expected. Some of those are obnoxious behaviors (dogmatism, intolerance, bigotries of various kinds), but many are much more gentle and polite and still desirable (cheeriness, niceness, generosity). Neither the obnoxious nor the desirable, however, provides an unobstructed glimpse into what the gospel calls for.
Undoubtedly, the gospel calls for love and forgiveness, for hope and encouragement, and the gospel takes very seriously the damage we do to one another, the life-draining commissions of harm and omissions of help, but it does so not to be “nice.” It does so, because it remembers. It does so, because it remembers that it is justice, righteousness, that we are to pursue—and injustice, unrighteousness, that we are to oppose. And this is not just any justice, not just anyone’s righteousness. It is the righteousness, the justice, of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was born to be crucified.
The gospel remembers that this righteousness, this justice, of the God of Jesus is often found where we don’t expect it. And it remembers that the unrighteousness, the injustice, that opposes God is often found where we so don’t want to find it, sometimes even in institutionalized churches—for example, the ones that set out to reinforce the walls they’ve built around what they have mistaken for the gospel. By doing so, they turn their backs on the “good news” of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
Let us be clear: no one can build or protect the Kingdom of God—except the God whose Kingdom it is. The Kingdom of God is like seeds a farmer sows in a field. The farmer doesn’t know how, but with rain and sun, the seeds spring forth. You may plant, another may water, but it is God who grants the growth. Indeed, the soil out of which the gospel emerges is not smooth, well-packed earth, the hard ground upon which a highway, say, might be paved. Rather the gospel emerges out of broken soil, soil opened by the rakes, hoes, shovels, and ploughs of a cultivator who knows that God disrupts the soil, when God sets out to let the gospel spring forth.
The beginning and the end of the gospel echo Isaiah 64. Its first words address the sovereign God: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”
At the first chapter of the gospel of Mark, as Jesus is baptized, he looks up and there, the text says, “he saw the heavens torn apart” (Mark 1:10). At the end of the gospel of Mark, when Jesus expires on the cross, “the curtain of the temple,” adorned with embroidered depictions of heavenly bodies, the text says, “was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Mark 15:38). The heavens are torn open first at his baptism, the foreshadowing of his crucifixion, and again as he died on the cross. These are bookends proclaiming the apocalypse that gives Jesus his name, that Jesus performs, that is performed by the God who has been dis-closed where Jesus opens to those he loves. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”
Advent is celebrated as a time of waiting. It is a way of remembering that Christmas is not guaranteed, that resurrection is not guaranteed, and that resurrection comes, if it comes, as a gift to those who lack every resource that could produce it. However, it is helpful to remember that the first Christmas, too, is, like the baptism of Jesus, a sign of what is to come. It is a mistake to think of Christmas Day as the first day of the chronology of the incarnation of God. The promise of Christmas is certainly that Jesus is “the one.” However, that promise is “fulfilled” (filled full and ruptured) only with Holy Week. It is the gathering of his whole life on Easter Sunday that makes Christmas Day the coming of God. And there is no Christmas Day without the strange glory of Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday shining back upon it. Indeed that is the logic of the gospel, that is, that God redeems the old, that God forgives, that God recreates, that God makes all things new. Not to open Christmas Day to Holy Week is the temptation of a shell of the gospel, say, of some nominally “Christian culture,” the temptation of a world that forgets who the gospel is for, the temptation of a world that hides from its own injustice, its own unrighteousness, its complicity in the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak under the heel of the rich and powerful. Woe to powerful institutional church officials who would look for camaraderie among this world’s principalities and powers.
It is ironic that institutionalized churches are often slow to notice that the very people battered by the world’s aggression are those from whom they themselves recoil. Indeed, it is wise for churches to be conscious in their spiritual disciplines of their own worldliness, their own blindness, as they are offended by their neighbors, especially those who do not conform to the standards of the world around them.
As we anticipate the Day of the Lord that is to rip open the sky, roll back clouds as a scroll, and disclose the wrath of God against all unrighteousness, we would do well to remember that we who are quickest to call ourselves “holy” and others “unholy” will “fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind will take us away.” The gospel calls upon us to repent of our lust for glory, our lust to rise above others, our lust to lay hold of a holy God. Our prayer on the way to Christmas Day must be our prayer on the way to every day, “O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
The closest thing to a founder that the Church of the Nazarene ever had was Phineas F. Bresee, the pastor of the Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles, a church founded in the late 1800s, years before there was a denomination with that name. The closing paragraphs of his sermon “Fidelity Is Better Than Fruit” voice the mood of Advent, the mood of anticipation, of waiting, of longing, of yearning—in which so much heaviness bears down upon us—though also so much hope. We are tempted during this time of waiting to imagine that the work is just too great and the number of faithful workers is too small for us to go on. But the promise of God is not empty. Our pain and exhaustion do not block the way of God into this world. God is always more than enough. Hear Bresee’s words:
“I love the cause of Christ with an intensity begotten of the fire off heaven’s altar. It drew me from my home in early youth. It has increased and strengthened and become more fervent as the days have gone by. My antagonism to worldliness and formality and earth-seeking becomes more and more intense. My soul looks up to God for heights and depths of anointings such as my earlier ministry knew nothing about; but yet I am continually being disappointed in the benefits of my own ministry. As I wait in the armory of divine truth, as I enter into the cloud of Divine Presence, as my mind is filled with Divine light, as I feel the unction and power in my soul, I feel as if I can level the mountains and fill up the valleys until the highway is prepared for the triumphant coming of my King. And I come forth and pour out my message, lay my hands, stained with the blood of His hands, upon the hearts of men, plead with them to come to God, point to the Cross, the hope of men, ‘Oh, the Cross has wondrous glory! / Oft I’ve proved this to be true;’
“I point to that Cross and say, ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!’ I point to the heaven the home of those saved by the power of the Cross. And thus when I have done all and looked to see the people enter in and be blessed and be saved, I so often see that the most of them remain as they were, like a rock washed by the ocean, the wave passes over it and it remains in the same place. Nay, not altogether like the rock, but harder and more hopeless than ever.
“How often after a week of study and prayer, and preaching from house to house, I come to my pulpit full of this great message, hearing so distinctly the voice of the Master saying, ‘Lo, I am with you,’ and at night go to my bed saying, ‘O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!’ Every Christian knows something of what this means. It is a part of that which we are permitted to bear in filling full His sufferings. But all this is not altogether without compensation to us. It settles us down upon the everlasting Rock. It deepens our piety. It shuts us up to God. He becomes to us the Alpha and Omega. It leads us, yea, it compels us to draw the mantle about us and look up and see Jesus only.
“Our piety is all too shallow. How possible that in the last analysis you may find your motives and ends are selfish. God, who makes all things work together for our good, makes even these untoward circumstances to draw us nearer to His bosom, and to enable us to learn how supremely sweet and blessed is His approval.
“What seems to the world success, seems to me to mean less and less. Divine approval of spirit and work seems more and more. I would rather be without success as far as men and angels can see and have for my reward the Divine approval than to have all success for a reward. Isaiah did not have success as far as the people were concerned. They sought help from Egypt or put their trust in the Assyrians. But he succeeded in standing for God, in being true to his commission.
“The great thing for the Church today is to be true to God. Isaiah’s life was not a failure. God’s plans are wider than our plans. Isaiah’s life was a magnificent success because of his fidelity to God. This world could better afford to be without the life of every king and emperor and general and president that ever lived, than without Isaiah’s life. There are untold multitudes of people in every country whose history dies with them just because they were not true to God. They seek their own success, seek their own lives and lose them.
“But Isaiah’s life was the sweetest success even to himself, finding in his early life the incoming glory. True, he had his disappointments, but these brought him into such close and clear touch with God. The Divine glory so enlarged his thought and filled his heart that the breath of God swept his being as the breezes sweep the aeolian harp. His vision was so clear, his ears were made so acute that God could talk to him and visions of divinest beauty and glory could sweep his soul.
“One thing he never lost sight of—some hear his voice, some are saved. His eye was on the remnant. Fidelity to God will not go wholly without fruit. Some will hear the truth. Some will see the dying Lamb.”